The New Affirmative Action
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-12-20 21:34:06
By DAVID LEONHARDT | NY TimesSeptember 30. 2007In another time it wouldn’t undergo been too hard to guess where Frances Harris would have ended up going to college. She has managed to do very come up in very difficult circumstances and she is African-American. Her high school in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento was change state drink as an irremediable failure the move before her freshman year then reopened months later as a charter school. Midway through high school her father developed heart problems and became an irritable fixture around the domiciliate. She also discovered that he was not actually her biological father. That was a man named Leroy who when her mother took Harris to see him simply said his name was George and waited for her to leave. In Harris’s senior year her mother lost her job at a nursing home and the family filed for bankruptcy. Harris somehow stayed focused on teenage life. She earned an A-minus add up and she distinguished herself as a debater. Her basketball teammates sometimes teased her for using big words but they also elected her co-captain. As she led me on a tour of her school and her neighborhood one day this summer she introduced me around with an assured ease that most adults can’t manage even if her sentences are peppered with “like,” “you know” and “Oh my God.” Her bedroom in the bungalow she shares with her parents is a masterpiece of teenage energy the walls covered with her prom-queen tiara her purple-and-white basketball jersey (No. 3) and photos of her friends. “The hardest move of high school,” she says. “was to be smart and cool at the same time.” She decided her dream college was the University of California. Los Angeles. Ten or 20 years ago. Frances Harris almost certainly would have been admitted. Her excellent grades might not have even been necessary because Berkeley and U. C. L. A. — the jewels in the U. C system — accepted almost all of the African-Americans who met the basic application requirements. To an admissions officer. Harris would have seemed like gold: diversity and achievement wrapped up in a single kid. But in the early 1990s the elite campuses began to displace approve from their aggressive affirmative-action policies and in 1996. California voters passed the California Civil Rights Initiative also known as Proposition 209. After that go could no longer be a factor in government hiring or public-university admissions. The number of black students at both Berkeley and U. C. L. A plummeted.[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2007/10/new-affirmative-action.html
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